The Commander s Role

The Commander’s Role

In the first chapter I talked about the importance of having a full team in the negotiating process, or at least thinking of the different functions as separate. As the closing takes place, the commander must be the one to step back and review what’s going on. At this stage, it often happens that the negotiator is too emotionally involved in the deal to make a judgment.

Friend of mine was buying a house a few years back that he knew would need a fair amount of work. He had his real estate agent negotiate a deal. She got a fair price within the parameters he had set, which in turn had been established with the help of a contractor. However, when the bank sent an assessor to look over the house and come up with a mortgage figure, the report came back about $15,000 lower than the agreed price.

What did the real estate agent do? Well, after saying that the assessor’s report was wrong, she contacted the other agent and came back to my buddy with the suggestion that the agents would knock a few thousand dollars off their commissions to make the deal fly.

Every situation is different, and I don’t want to make blanket statements about real estate agents and house prices and mortgage companies. But the real estate agent’s reaction in this case told my friend that his negotiator was far too involved in the deal itself to stand back and make a logical conclusion about what to do. He thanked her and then, after analyzing the assessor’s opinion, sent another house inspector through the building for a second look at the premises. The assessor’s valuation was probably off a little, he decided, but not by that much. Armed with the new information, he had the agent go back to the buyer, with the bank’s price as his goal. As it happened, the deal eventually fell through—and a good thing, my friend concluded, as not only had the agreed-upon price been a little high, but there was more work needed that hadn’t been spotted during the original reviews.